As we mentioned about a month ago, Microsoft released Office 2003 back in September, but didn't put it through to Automatic Updates at the time. Instead they let people manually install it so that the evaluation would be widespread.

Now they say SP3 is a big splash and today it becomes available through Automatic Updates. So that's why your connection may be a bit slow for a while (the manual download is 117.7MB).

I've been running SP3 on my Office 2003 systems pretty much since September and notice no problems.